What Migrant Birds Teach Us About Leadership?

The V-formation works in nature. We learn from migrant birds that taking turns in leading the flock reduce bird exhaustion and increase task completion.

A group of migrant birds fly longer than one single bird. It’s more tiresome for a geese to fly alone than a dozen geese flying in a group from Tennessee to Florida using the V-formation.

I wonder why human being don’t adopt the V-formation utilized by birds more often in operations. I think it’s fear to release power.

Operations that are dependent on the inspiration of one individual for decision making are prone to exhaust the members of the system, including the leader.

I don’t know about you but I have limited capacity in my brain and energy. They are both the facto finite. Leading alongside others and literally enabling them to make decisions sometimes seems logical to me.

Migrant geese, ducks, swans… they are the masters of true leadership and they do exactly that. They understand that they have limited energy and that the whole is more important than the sum of the parts.

They are okay with sacrificing themselves for the group in return of group success and survival. This is true leadership to me.

It seems that migrant birds are systemic thinkers who evolved to a sophisticated level of collaboration that even the human animal can’t comprehend. Survival of their species is in the back of their minds, Perhaps.

The survival of the team should also be in the back of any leader’s mind in my opinion. No leader can do all the work alone without being exhausted in the process.

We can learn effective leadership by observing the behaviors of migrant birds. Taking turns in leadership is how these birds, every year, successfully move south for survival.

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Author: Dr. Luis Camillo Almeida

Communication Arts professor who has taught over a thousand students in his career. By empathizing with his students, he advises them to think with no box and motivates them to have a successful college life. Through his multifaceted approach to traditional and new medias, his students have the opportunity to become better communicators. Dr. A has helped hundreds of young adults to truly discover who they are, what makes them tick and where their passions lie, in order to achieve long term success in life. He is a very productive college professor who can be found on a variety of social media outlets, public and academic sources, and even on merchandise showcasing his photographic art. Technology complements but doesn’t define him. Colleges house him but can’t hold him.
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